The 1965 movie that killed James Stewart’s stand-in: “It’s built like a brick outhouse”
Like virtually every other actor in Hollywood history not named Tom Cruise, James Stewart would leave his career’s most dangerous or death-defying scenes to the professionals, even if he was qualified to do them himself.
Not that he was renowned for his high-octane action movies like the face of Mission: Impossible, but Stewart made enough thrillers and westerns in his time to know how to handle himself in an onscreen brawl, shootout, or perilous situation where his character would barely make it out alive.
There’s no such thing as a production guaranteed to go off without a hitch, although anything involving hair-raising set pieces and perilous action beats usually stands a higher chance of something going wrong. It was cruelly ironic, in a way, with the stand-in for one of cinema’s most experienced pilots being tragically killed when a scene ended in disaster.
Stewart earned his civilian pilot’s license in 1935, gained a commercial license several years later, and had hundreds of hours of flight time under his belt before he’d even enlisted in the United States Army to serve in World War II, where he piloted over two dozen combat missions and left the service as the highest-ranked actor in the history of his nation’s military.
However, despite serving as the narrative backbone of 1965’s The Flight of the Phoenix, due to the health and safety regulations in place, he never did any of his own flying onscreen. In Robert Aldrich’s survival drama, the ‘Golden Age’ icon played Frank Towns, the pilot of a cargo plane that crashes in the middle of the desert.
To escape their predicament, Towns and the rest of the stranded passengers aim to rebuild the aircraft as best they can from the wreckage left behind, and in the name of realism, the picture built a rickety plane of its own and enlisted veteran stunt pilot Paul Mantz, who’d spent decades in the air for Hollywood, the Army, and in air races, to step into the cockpit.
In The Flight of the Phoenix, Towns pilots the ensemble cast to safety, but to capture those moments for the cameras, Mantz, who was only flying on the film because his business partner, Frank Tallman, was injured, was killed when the specially constructed Tallmantz Phoenix P-1, built specifically for the picture, crashed into the ground and split its fuselage in half.
On June 29th, 1965, Mantz took the plane up for its first test flight, relaying that “it flies like a dream.” He was so confident that he said, “It can do just about anything,” commenting that the Phoenix P-1 “will take it alright; it’s built like a brick outhouse.” On July 8th, after several more successful tests, he was dead.
At around 6.30 am, Mantz performed the scene without incident, but on the second approach, the plane hit the ground, bounced into the air, and when he tried to stabilise the aircraft, it crashed, ejecting him from the wreckage and killing him instantly. When The Flight of the Phoenix was released in December, he was memorialised in the credits as “a fine man and a brilliant flyer, who gave his life in the making of this film.”
